Dr Johnson's Sore Toe: Touch, Naturalism and Kingdom Hearts

(Originally published 9/9/16 at JRPGsaredead.fyi)

In 1710, George Berkeley published Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, in which he argued that everything that exists is just perceptions in the mind of God. The Principles made quite a splash, though were not taken very seriously. Some years later, when asked his opinion on Berkeley's theory, Samuel Johnson is reputed to have declaimed 'I refute it thus' and kicked a large stone at the side of the path.

Berkeley is sometimes credited as the founder of what in philosophy is known as idealism[1], a group of ontological positions which hold that there is no such thing as 'matter' (physical, or mind-independent, substance). As such, the ontological claims of idealism have usually been received with Johnson's derision, whatever respect has been paid to their arguments (and in some cases the respect is substantial; Kant and Hegel, for example, are both idealists).

This scorn has much to do with the dominance of the opposing view. Materialism, the ontological position that there is such a thing as matter (or more recently, that there is only matter), is the prevailing ideology of global-capitalist/anglo- or euro-centric/'western' culture. It is materialists, generally, who write our histories of ideas and who set the terms under which they are taught.

And this is important, because the contention between idealist and materialist is not really so ephemeral or absurd as it seems. Materialist histories frame the issue as one of obscure metaphysical curiosity, but the debate about what exists serves, and always has, as a proxy for a debate about what has value.

Berkeley himself understood his idealism to be fundamentally political. A cleric who would later become Bishop of Cloyne, he saw the turmoil of the seventeenth century as a result of the rise of mercantile and imperialist materialism[2]. For Berkeley, materialism placed matter between humans and God and interrupted our spiritual connection to the divine. Berkeley's project was to reassert God's immanent involvement in everything that happens or exists.

One need not buy into Berkeley's religion to understand the point, though. Idealism holds that value and worth depend for their existence on human (or human-like) experiences, thoughts and/or judgements. Material objects have no intrinsic value, and are only valuable insofar as they sustain valuable experiences. In this sense, idealism is potentially quite radical[3].

In video games, materialism becomes (what we tend to call) 'realism'. I'm not sure anyone has ever explicitly put it this way, but the thesis is roughly that, since it is material objects that have value, virtual objects can only have value to the extent that they are like material objects.

So a key element of video game materialism is simulation – specifically, I think, the simulation of space, time and physics. We see this in the specific cachet afforded to games with fully contiguous spaces ('metroidvanias', Dark Souls), games that 'take place in real time' (Majora's Mask, Lightning Returns) and games with detailed physics engines (Half Life, Portal and the many other children of Havok)[4].

There is something else, though, too, that is more difficult to pin down in words. If value is mind-independent, human-independent, then it cannot have the appearance of being man-made. So materialism in games also involves concealing the hand of the designer. For this reason, I prefer the term 'naturalism' to 'realism'.

Naturalism is the aspiration of any piece of art or media to seem 'found' rather than created. It is how we can debate the 'realism' of the visual effects representing Godzilla in a film, and the source of mysticism about the poetic muse. It's a particular vice among fantasy authors; we like to pretend that our stories are not crafted, that instead we merely document events in other realities, which arrive in our minds by transdimensional magic.

In games it is the dream of the virtual world that is a perfect, comprehensive equivalent of our own, constructed by algorithms that do more than a human designer ever could[5]. A lot of the excitement around No Man's Sky came from the suggestion it would generate a whole universe from a set of elegant, computable rules. Something similar underpinned Spore's hype, and contributes to the sense of infinite promise associated with Minecraft.

Discussion of naturalism – of realism-in-fantasy - usually crops up when someone is using 'realism' to excuse lazy, regressive or harmful worldbuilding; the infamous 'it wouldn't be realistic to have black people in The Witcher III'. This assertion is obviously nonsense, but it's not the only pernicious product of video game naturalism.

'Kinaesthetics' is a slightly controversial term, and 'gamefeel' much worse, but Dr Johnson's sore toe does suggest that, in some way, tangibility – the capacity to be (or seem to be) touched – is more important to our perception of materiality than visibility or appearance. One of the major reasons that mainstream games discourse fetishizes 'interactivity' so centrally is the sense of tactile contact that games (commonly) provide but other screenbound art forms (generally) do not.

Of course, we cannot literally touch virtual objects (in the sense of applying force to them with our bodies to stimulate pressure-sensitive nerves in our skin). But we do touch things as we play, and in response to that, virtual objects that we can see touch other virtual objects, and some very deep neural wiring involved in our ordinary hand-eye coordination is activated. The metaphor of touch is often useful to describe the phenomenal (experiential) effects of this process.

Software input/output loops which are not presented in such a way as to be interpreted as touch-centric often invite scorn for 'not really being games'. This is evident in the response to 'walking simulators', which generally deny the player any touching except through the out-of-sight-out-of-mind soles of their virtual feet. It was evident, too, in the 'excel spreadsheet' jokes I and many others used to make about football manager games; and it persists especially in criticisms of JRPGs for their heavy reliance on menus and statistics.

It's worth noting that our vocabulary for describing tactile sensation is not as rich nor as heavily theorised as our visual vocabulary. I struggle, as have many philosophers before me, to avoid my talk of perception slipping into talk exclusively of visual perception. So it isn't a surprise that the discussion of kinaesthetics has often been burdened with ill-defined use of words like 'sharp', 'precise', 'sluggish' or 'heavy'. We may each have some feeling about what these words mean, but they are frequently opaque without direct experiential context.

Still, because of the capacity to suggest tangibility, it might be thought that video games naturally favour materialism. Indeed, there's a very plausible argument that the emphasis placed on realism/naturalism in mainstream gaming has helped create the overwhelmingly conservative climate in the big-money parts of the industry and audience. But I don't think it has to be this way.

Precisely because of the kinaesthetic element, games are perhaps better-placed to challenge materialism than other screen-bound artforms. Games don't have to valorise simulation; they don't have to feel kinaesthetically 'right' or like our world. It's not just that we can experience different kinds of motion and physics, though this is valuable in its own right. Games can challenge our assumptions about the place of materiality in our value schemes.

'Dreamlike' isn't much better than 'sharp' or 'heavy' as a kinaesthetic term, but it was the best I could come up with when talking about Kingdom Hearts. It's not just the kinaesthetics - the game's wonderful opening movie is rife with the cinematic language of dream sequences, too – but they're a big part of why the game feels so ethereal.

In the interest of being specific, here's the things I identified as contributing to this feeling:

• How much time Sora spends with his feet off the ground. Jumping lasts a long time, and the amount of horizontal steering you can do while airborne has nothing to do with 'real-world' physics. To add to that, Sora will jump when you attack enemies that are over a certain height above the ground; the threshold for this is arbitrary and difficult to judge. It's easy to find yourself floating in an aerial combo almost without realising.
• Enemy movement. Many enemies in Kingdom Hearts evade damage by moving out of reach or range. This is true right from the very earliest heartless, whose gimmick is their ability to sink into the floor as shadows. This means that often you will reach for an enemy and find it not there. Amid the frenetic visual noise of combat, this can feel like your keyblade passes straight through an enemy's body.
• Camerawork. More specifically, the way the camera behaviour interacts with locking on to enemies. The camera follows the wild movements of targeted enemies pretty much one-to-one, so your perspective swings around a lot in ways you can't control. A lot of things you need to keep track of only happen in your peripheral vision, and you can't always direct visual attention to them when needed.
• Topology. The game's environments are generally small, and lead into one another in awkward, difficult-to-follow ways. It's very easy to get lost, or to feel like you've turned back on yourself but ended up in a different place from where you started. You couldn't build spaces like this; they'd collapse. They can exist only because they are not material, but virtual.

I leapt to understanding these phenomena as dreamlike, I think, because I don't have many other conventions to apply to a world and physics this different. There's nothing in Kingdom Hearts' narrative, though, to suggest that its events are to be understood as sleeping hallucinations. Sora never wakes up. The game's world is his world.

It might feel solipsistic, as so many games do, as if only Sora is real, the game's environments sustained purely for his experiencing. But Kingdom Hearts' story includes at least one character as real as Sora: Riku. Not for nothing are all the game's most compelling boss fights duels against Sora's closest friend.

Kingdom Hearts isn't really about Heartless, or Maleficent and the Disney Princesses, or even defeating Ansem(/Xemnas/Xehanort). Those are part of its iconography, they add meaning, but the heart of the game is the relationship between Sora and Riku. Everything that happens matters mainly because of how it affects the two boys' understanding of each other.

All the ways in which the world is made to feel intangible, insubstantial, materially impossible, serve to prioritise this emotional and social core. Yes, one can take an interest in other elements of the story, as subsequent games have done, but Kingdom Hearts itself lives and dies by how it engages you in Sora's effort to understand Riku, how their conflict, the slight desynchronisation of their goals as they begin to mature, moves you.

Idealists do not deny that the tangible, physical world exists; Doctor Johnson's sore toe proves nothing. Instead, for the idealist, the things we commonly take to be material exist only insofar as they facilitate relationships among human experiences.

It is not that there is no rock for Johnson to kick; the rock is the relationship between the brown, irregular shape you see and the stinging pain in the good doctor's toe. We use the expression and concept 'the rock' to communicate about the pain he felt; to explain how it came about, how it might be ameliorated, and crucially whether you can empathise with him over it.

Something similar can be said of scientific 'reality'. We (take ourselves to) know that atoms exist because they are the most effective way of relating many different experimental results. To the idealist, those experiments are ultimately experiences, and atoms are nothing over and above the explanatory relationship between those experiences.

If this seems trivial or silly, consider that exactly the same goes for 'big' concepts like justice. Justice is a concept we must agree on, that we must negotiate from a position of equality. Just as Dr Johnson may invoke the rock as an explanation for the pain in his toe, you may invoke injustice for the pain of how you have been treated by an organisation, culture or individual.

This appeal asks me to recognise not only the negative experience you have had but also your moral sense, your capacity to make judgements about your experiences. It asks me to acknowledge your humanity, your personhood.

A materialist treatment of justice (and here, to add another loaded word to the mix, 'materialist' starts to line up with 'essentialist') holds that justice – like the table – is a thing that exists independently of us, above us. It is not a thing we create and live, but a thing we discover.

And 'discoveries', of course, are more a matter of who gets to claim them than of who does the actual finding. So it is that Columbus could 'discover' the Americas, a landmass settled thousands of years earlier and even visited from Europe many times before him. To get credit for a discovery, you must have a platform of influence and power from which to make your claim.

You can see where I'm going with this. Materialism enables those with a platform to ignore or dismiss counterclaims, to bypass the process of negotiation that would otherwise humanise the marginalised. Appeals to 'nature', 'realism', 'objectivity' and so on all serve this purpose, to excuse the powerful from negotiating on even terms with the disempowered.

Kingdom Hearts shows one way that video games can challenge these assertions. Free of our-world physics, the game conveys thoroughly how intangible its objects are. Things matter only insofar as they matter to people.

[1] Like any history, the history of ideas is more complicated than this. Berkeley's is the first comprehensive, unequivocally idealist work of the modern period, but other things that might legitimately be called idealism predate him by up to a couple of millennia.

[2] The hypocrisy should not be overlooked, that this came from a man of noble birth who would rise to Bishop of an Anglican congregation in Ireland.

[3] Etymologically, the consonance of metaphysical idealism with political 'idealism' (naive optimism) is barely more than a coincidence, but it is not entirely inappropriate.

[4] None of these games draws its sole appeal from its approach to simulation, but the highlighted features are prominent in responses to and discussion of them.

[5] Of course, a human designer did achieve everything the algorithm achieves, by creating the algorithm, but naturalism insists or at least pretends otherwise.

The Only 'Real' That Matters

You know that feeling of disbelief when you beat a difficult final boss and instead of another phase the ending cutscene starts to play? The sunrise-slow shift from breathless relief to triumph?

Has a plot twist ever punched you right in the gut (looking at you, Aeris)? Has an environment ever sent chills down your spine[1]? Ever find yourself wanting to chew your controller (don’t inspect my old Gamecube pad for toothmarks, please), or pitch your TV out the window?

These are the kind of effects that often get forgotten in the popular debate about whether games can have ‘real effects’. The focus tends to be on whether games are turning ‘our children’ into (a) uncontrollably violent beasts or (b) posthuman supergeniuses. But of course games can have real effects at the personal level, and the other concerns are best left to psychologists with some grasp of proper investigative methodology.

And it’s not just that certain pieces of digital software can cause effects on real people. If you cried when Aeris died, or punched the air when you beat your first Bowser, it wasn’t the flipping of a bit somewhere inside the console, or a shifting pattern of electromagnetic radiation emitted by the screen that had that effect on you.

Okay, in a way it was, but describing the pattern of light or the behaviour of the silicon isn’t the best explanation of your response. You didn’t punch the air because of [obscure technical description of computer hardware]. You punched the air because YOU BEAT BOWSER YEAAHHHH.

And really, that should be all it takes to justify the serious study of games and gaming. We shouldn’t need esoteric philosophical arguments like this and this to defend what we do. In an ideal world, the capacity to cause real experiences would be the only thing that counted when deciding what’s worth taking an interest in[2].

It can be tempting to dismiss this position on the grounds that game events or objects are just fictions – that we can account for them in the same way that we account for Sherlock Holmes, or Batman, or Narnia. And you know, fair enough provided you’re going to take the study of Sherlock Holmes and Batman and Narnia seriously (pulp crime fiction, comics and children’s fantasy have all had their own fights for recognition in academia). But there is a bit of a difference.

A fiction is a kind of tacit agreement between audience and author. Very roughly, when you open a novel, you’re accepting that the author is going to tell you a bunch of lies (or at least, things that aren’t true), but that something in those lies will be worth your attention. You’re entertaining the lies in the hope or expectation that they will have some positive effect on you – make you feel good, teach you something new, guide you to self-reflection.

Some games are fictions, of course. But some don’t really involve straightforward fictive assertions at all. Look at a game like Geometry Dash, a game that consists almost entirely of level geometry. The geometry of a Dash level isn’t a lie about how things are in some other realm, it’s just there. If I tell you there’s a sequence of spikes at a certain point in the level, that’s true.

In this way, game objects are more like the notes of a piece of music. They may contribute to the telling of a story, or the communication of fictive claims, but they are real parts of the work, however transient or intangible. “There’s a mushroom in the second ‘?’ block of Super Mario Bros level 1-1.” is the same kind of statement as “The first notes of Scott Joplin’s The Entertainer are a D octave.”

This is why I think it’s useful to consider game events real; it’s not just that they’re causally effective (though in some ways that’s enough on its own), but that they are also intersubjectively consistent in a way that fictive events are not. If you claim that ‘Sherlock Holmes lived at 221B Baker St.’, I am not obliged to agree, since the statement is only accurate to Conan Doyle’s fiction, and not the Baker Street that you can walk along in London. We must agree a frame of reference before that statement is true. But ‘The Companion Cube appears in Test Chamber 17’ is true simpliciter.

There’s more to be said on this, particularly concerning the types of fictional statement (‘221B Baker Street’ is a fictional address in a real place, whereas somewhere like ‘Bag End, Hobbiton’ is a fictional address in a fictional place), but I do need to leave something for the academic paper I’m writing on this subject, so I’ll leave things here for now.







[1] I’m not able to offer any intelligible examples of this one because I scare easily and I’m not admitting just how terrified I was of the Great Deku Tree for a while in early 1999…

[2] For more on this terrible philosophy joke, I wrote a brief and slightly clunky introduction to philosophical idealism here.

Real Space

A few weeks ago I discussed one of the problems with trying to use 'real' to differentiate between video game worlds and our world. There, my discussion was based around issues of constitution and factuality. Now, I want to pick up a different issue in the same vein, one that I touched on when discussing Unwind; the fact that video games don't take place in our space.

In fact, it's tempting to say that video game events don't take place in (a) space(s) at all. They represent spaces (better: they present visual patterns which represent spaces), sure, but that's not the same as involving a space. Or is it? Depends what 'a space' is.

At the most basic level, Barry Dainton (full disclosure: my boss) identifies two functions we attribute to space rather than its occupants. Constraint is the function of limiting the ways we can move; our space is three dimensional, so any motion we can make is a combination of movements in those three dimensions[1]. Connection is the function of allowing space-occupants to interact; wherever you are, you and I are spatially connected because there are logically possible spatial movements that would bring us into contact.

It should be obvious that video game spaces meet these criteria. Connectedness is almost trivial when it comes to game objects, since a game cannot present an object unless it is possible within the game to view that object (and thus connect it at least to the camera/viewpoint). Dimensional constraint is such a significant factor in some games that we use different dimensionalities to partly define some genres – 2D and 3D platformers, for example.

Of course, this is a broad definition. It allows as a space anything that has both dimensions and occupants; the standard windows and HTML colour charts become spaces, whose dimensions may be rendered either as red, blue and green or hue, saturation and value. This shouldn't seem too counterintuitive, since we often and productively represent the colour chart spatially.

The colour chart is a kind of space we might naturally think of as abstract, but it's quite hard to pin down what this means. Its occupants are abstract in that they are colours abstracted from any particular object possessing them, but this is a fact about the occupants of the space, not the space itself.

Video game spaces are in a similar situation; we know they don't take place in our space, since we are not conventionally connected to their occupants (nor, indeed, conventionally constrained by their dimensions). But if there is a difference in kind between our space and game spaces – if video game spaces are not real in the way that our space is – it is difficult to articulate.

The simplest way is to adopt the substantival construal of space put forward by Newton to fit his classical mechanics. According to this view, space is a thing that exists independently of its occupants; list the fundamental ingredients of the universe and in addition to a set of physical atoms, there will also be a set of spatial points or regions. Empty a room of all its physical contents, and a substance remains: space, separating the walls and permeating the intermediary void.

Despite the utility of the physics that go alongside it, Newton's theory of space is notoriously difficult to prove. Newton's proofs rely on demonstrating absolute motion and rest – motion which is relative not to other objects but to space itself. The bucket argument is the best-known of these. Whether the bucket argument proves Newton right about substantival space, though, it cannot differentiate systemically between our space and game spaces; any game may be programmed to mimic the effect on which the argument trades.

Newton, then, cannot help us differentiate between 'real' and 'virtual' spaces. The chief opponent of substantivalism, the relationism of Leibniz and Descartes, does even less to distinguish the two. According to relationism, space is merely a matter of the spatial relations among objects; no objects, no space. So any set of real objects that are connected and subject to shared dimensional constraints will constitute a space.

This passes the question of whether game spaces are real or not back to the question of whether game objects are real, and as I argued last time out, there's little ground for saying game objects are less real than the conventional objects we deal with on a day-to-day basis.

Perhaps it's better to view this as a reductio ad absurdum on the common use of the term 'real'. We can intuitively understand that there's a difference between our relation to game objects and our relation to regular tables and chairs without needing to dismiss game objects as lesser.

Here, one final philosophical notion may be useful. In his work on possibility, David Lewis developed the theory of modal realism, which holds that every possibility is a universe in its own right, on a metaphysical par with our own. His reasons for this extremely profligate version of parallel world theory aren't important; what's useful is how he understands one particular possibility's being 'actual'.

For Lewis, 'actual' just means 'in our universe'. It's an indexical term, like 'here' or 'now' – its meaning depends on who says it. When I say 'here' it (almost always, because I don't get out much) means my house in Liverpool. I can say 'It's warm here', and absolutely not contradict you when you say 'It's cold here', so long as you and I are in different places.

We can use 'real' to distinguish between our space and video game spaces in much the same way; a 'real' space is a space we're in. Our space is real to us; the space of Hyrule is real to Link.

I've got one more sense of 'real' that I want to discuss, the one that I think is both most important and most clearly shared by game events and objects, but that will have to wait for another time.







[1]: This puts aside, for simplicity's sake, string and M theories which suggest our space may have more than three dimensions, as well as holographic theories which suggest it has fewer.

Experiential Worlds

Video game worlds are, we generally think, not real. This is an opinion often used dismissively (for an example, see the attitudes of the architectural establishment reported by Claris Cyarron in this recent piece). But on closer inspection, it turns out to be quite difficult to clarify what the claim means – what is real?

You can tell I've devoted the last ten years of my life to philosophy, huh?

On the face of it, a thing is 'real' if there are facts, or true statements, about it. My desk is real, because it has a mass, a shape, an extension. It supports my computer, and sometimes my face if I doze off while working.

By contrast, Sherlock Holmes' house at 221B Baker Street is not real. No such address exists, so no claim that Conan Doyle makes about its size, architecture or decor can be true. Of course, there are some conventions about this house which we can all agree on. If I ask you 'What is Sherlock Holmes' address?', there is a correct answer: '221B Baker Street'.

And this answer is correct because it is in at least some sense true – it is an accurate report of Conan Doyle's fictive claim that Sherlock Holmes lived at 221B Baker Street. So, there is a kind of truth to some statements of fiction, and thus a kind of reality to their claims.

This will convince no-one that video game worlds are real by itself, though, and nor should it. It is hardly a novel claim that I can give you a correct report of something I have read. The truth of 'Sherlock Holmes lived at 221B Baker Street' is not the same kind of truth as the truth of 'My desk is six feet wide'. Or is it?

Let's look a bit closer at this second statement, or rather at the object to which it purports to refer. The desk, we know, is a composite. It is made up of atoms, which are themselves composed mostly of empty space and a few tiny subatomic particles; these particles fuzz away into inconsistent, ill-defined energy fields on even closer inspection. Where does my desk end? Look close enough and it becomes difficult to recognise the desk at all.

Other properties of the desk – its mass, its solidity – become even more ephemeral. Does this mean that we should regard the claim that my desk is six feet long, or that it is solid, as false? If so, the only true statements are presumably the scientific ones (certainly this is the way the philosophical establishment tends to think of it).

But the scientific facts, about minute particles and fields, are much less useful to us in the everyday. Yes, technically the Standard Model of quantum physics describes all possible fundamental interactions, but good luck using it to derive the GDP of Chile, or whether so-and-so fancies you, or even if your bus will show up on time. (For reference, all these calculations are impossible – the universe cannot provide sufficient computing power).

In philosophy, we identify two different classes of fact at work here; experiential facts, which concern how things appear to us, and fundamental facts, which concern how things are in themselves, independently of us.

While variations on this distinction have been a major theme in much of modern philosophy, it's probably Kant who did most with it, in distinguishing between the phenomenal (experiential) and noumenal (fundamental) worlds. His grandest claim was that the truly noumenal is unknowable – because after all, we can only know about scientific fundamenta through experiments that bring them into the experiential realm. Privileging only noumenal facts as true, or truly real, then, is self-defeating; we cannot know anything about that reality.

So we should expect to have to take experiential facts seriously – and indeed we do. Experiential facts are what we use to navigate our way to the shops; to choose what to eat; to cook without burning ourselves. Can you tell I'm hungry as I write this?

The application to video game worlds should be clear by now – they are experiential worlds, on their own terms. It is true that the second '?' block at the start of Super Mario Bros contains a mushroom. That, fundamentally, this truth is sustained by the electrical properties of a handful of tiny pieces of silicon in a cartridge is not relevant to whether you get past the first Goomba (or get mocked for failing to do so).

There is a lot more that could be said on this – my 70,000-word doctoral thesis, for example, is entirely concerned with the nature of experiential worlds and how we should understand the relationship between the world we experience and the world posited by contemporary physics. Many philosophers would prefer to throw out Kant's distinction altogether – many more would defend it (philosophers are like this about everything, by the way). But this serves as a reasonable introduction.

So next time someone tells you video game worlds 'aren't real', ask them what they mean.